A Possible Clue in Jane Austen’s Glasses. Did Arsenic Kill Her?

LONDON — The cause of Jane Austen’s mysterious death at the age of 41 has been much pondered over the years. Was it a hormonal disorder? Cancer? Complications from drinking unpasteurized milk?

New research by the British Library suggests a more dramatic possibility: arsenic poisoning.

Researchers at the library, working with the London optometrist Simon Barnard, recently examined three pairs of glasses believed to have belonged to Austen, and said that they show evidence that her vision severely deteriorated in her final years.

That kind of deterioration further suggests cataracts, and cataracts may indicate arsenic poisoning, Sandra Tuppen, a curator of archives and manuscripts at the library, wrote in a blog post on the library’s website on Thursday.

“If Austen did develop cataracts,” as the glasses indicate, Dr. Tuppen wrote, one likely cause is “accidental poisoning from a heavy metal such as arsenic.”

The optometrical revelation adds a wonky note of drama to the 200th anniversary of Austen’s death in 1817, weeks after she had traveled to Winchester seeking help for an illness. The glasses, which cannot be said definitively to have belonged to Austen, were bequeathed to the library several years ago by her relatives. They had been kept in a desk belonging to Austen.

“We knew that she had trouble with her eyes, because on several occasions she refers to weak eyes,” Dr. Tuppen said in an interview. She emphasized that the glasses did not indicate that anybody had set out to murder Austen, the author of “Pride and Prejudice.” That possibility was floated in the 2013 crime novel “The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen,” by Lindsay Ashford, who claimed to have found clues in Austen’s writing and other sources hinting at arsenic poisoning.

Arsenic was frequently found in water, medication and even wallpaper in Austen’s time, Dr. Tuppen emphasized, and unintentional arsenic poisoning was, she said, “quite common.”

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A portable writing desk that belonged to Austen, with glasses.CreditBritish Library Board

Janine Barchas, an Austen expert at the University of Texas at Austin, called the arsenic theory a “quantum leap” and referred to the blog post’s splashy web headline (and the library’s promotion of the post) as “a smidgen reckless.”

Dr. Barchas has been doing her own intensive study of Austen’s prescription, summed up in a new paper, “Speculations on Spectacles: Jane Austen’s Eyeglasses, Mrs. Bates’s Spectacles, and John Saunders in ‘Emma,’” set to be published in the journal Modern Philology. (This isn’t the first time Dr. Barchas’s Austen scholarship has gotten physical: Her project What Jane Saw, which recreated an art exhibition Austen visited in 1813, involved puzzling over Austen’s precise height.)

In the Modern Philology paper, she and a co-author, Elizabeth Picherit, weave together an argument on Austen’s late-in-life health and her social milieu based on her novels, her life and her glasses.

Deirdre Le Faye, an independent critic in Britain who recently published a paper that maintains that Austen died of Addison’s disease, is also skeptical. She said that while Austen could have ingested arsenic through medication, other elements of the British Library’s biographical analysis seemed less persuasive.

The library’s post “says that the last pair of glasses is very strong, that she must have been almost blind by the end of her life,” she said. But Ms. Le Faye, who has edited a collection of Austen’s correspondence, said Austen was writing letters “perfectly ably” up to about six weeks before her death. Rapid deterioration of her eyesight would have had to be very sudden to fit the library’s analysis, she said.

Visitors to the library will soon be able to look at, if not look through, the glasses, which go on display on Friday.

Ms. Le Faye said that she understood the desire to see excitement in Austen’s fairly quiet life.

“The trouble is, Jane Austen lived such a quiet, placid life that there isn’t a great deal of drama in it,” she said. “You just can’t find it. So the trouble is, people start to invent drama.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Did Arsenic Kill Austen? Check Her Glasses. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe